Project B6

In this project, we aim at the first experimental observation of chiral discriminatory optical forces at the single-molecule level and exploit them for enantiomer separation of a racemic [7]-helicene beam. To achieve this, we combine helicity-gradient optical fields generated by a pulsed near-infrared laser with a highly collimated molecule beam and spatially resolved detection methods. In the near future, we plan to extend this experiment to the matter-wave regime, where enantio-specific matter-wave diffraction and quantum sensing of chiral interactions will be feasible.